Can I soften the tracking curve?

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

Choose Window > The smoother

Then Select your keyframes, and use the smoother. It will smooth out the motion path for the tracker by removing keyframes. Based on the tolerance you set it can remove a little or a lot.

My understanding is that the number you use decides how many pixels off the current value it can vary, and by doing that it can get rid of keyframes that are not necessary anymore.

On the other hand, is it possible your footage is interlaced? If so, that might explain the jitter. You need to tell the motion tracker that the footage is interlaced so it can account for that.

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Chris Gleinser]

Okay, that seems to be a cool tool 😉

The problem is, though, that the smoother seems to connect the most extreme points’ keyframes, and so if my jittered motion contains peaks, those will still remain. In my case, the smoother should omit those peaks if he notices that all the surrounding keyframes are different.

The footage has fields, but I don’t think that that’s the reason, because I interpreted it as field footage and on sharper pictures it works perfectly. The problem is just that the footage has been shot by night and is grainy and blurry :/

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

Try removing some of the extreme points manually and then give it another go with the smoother.

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Darby Edelen]

[Aharon Rabinowitz] “Choose Window > The smoother”

The other option is an expression called, big surprise here:

smooth(width=.2, samples=5, t=time)

This samples 5 points distributed across .2 seconds centering on the current time and smooths the value.

The sample above has the default values, but any values could be given for width/samples/t:

smooth(1, 9)

The above would sample 9 points over 1 second centering on the current time (its generally best to use odd numbers, that way the center of the 9 samples is on the current frame). Notice that I didn’t have to write:

smooth(1, 9, time)

The function will use a default value (given in the first sample) if you don’t supply one, so this:

smooth()

Works as well, but it uses all of the default values.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Chris Gleinser] “The problem is just that the footage has been shot by night and is grainy and blurry :/”

I recommend trying to remove some of the grain and looking for a better method/channel to track. If the ‘luminance’ isn’t providing a good track then try tracking based on color. You can use RGB or look at your color channels and see if one is significantly clearer than the others (and make sure your feature is visible!), if it is use that channel for the tracking.

Removing the grain is probably the most important part though =)

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA